Reed Boat

A reed boat is a traditional watercraft built by binding together bundles of buoyant reeds, such as papyrus or totora, rather than constructing a hull from wooden planks or a dugout log. The technique is one of the oldest known boatbuilding traditions, practiced independently by ancient Egyptian civilization along the Nile River and, separately, by Andean peoples such as the Uros around Lake Titicaca in South America, who continue to build and use reed boats today. Reed boats are valued for being lightweight, buoyant and constructed from materials that are locally abundant and require no metal tools or fasteners, though they typically have a shorter working life than wooden vessels.